It's always a little dubious when modern people pretend to have high confidence about the behaviors of long-dead people to serve their modern purposes. (Another example: oh you're an INFJ, just like Moses from the Bible!)
Our ancient ancestors never had to deal with such deep thoughts, so we can't help but make dubious comparisons because our brains haven't evolved enough.
Yes, it's so lazy. Modern people ought to pretend to greater laziness, and then things would go better.
I met one of the founders of Coder.com, he's a really cool dude. It's a pity that it is a product aimed more at enterprises than individual developers, else it would have far more developer mindshare.
Unlike, say, GitHub Codespaces, running something like this on your own infra means your incentives and Coder.com's are aligned, i.e. both of you want to reduce your cloud costs (as opposed to, say, GitHub running on Azure gives them an opportunity and incentive to mark up on Azure cloud costs).
It seems like a great product. I'm wondering why they don't offer more "startup-oriented" plans. It's like either Self Hosted or "Talk to sales". Is it maybe to not compete against Github codespaces?
Mildly interesting that the author runs a media relations company in SF.
On the one hand, I am sympathetic to the general perspective of the original article.
On the other hand, that the same person is writing “hit pieces” and running a media relations company bears a certain resemblance to protection rackets of yore
The implication is that the writer is using their bona fides as a corporate media relations expert to craft a compelling narrative targeting a person with a lucrative corporate position. It just so happens that this position is reliant on their political skills rather than their technical qualifications because by all metrics they are terrible at doing what it is they position requires, so instead of watching their reputation blow up and their ability to keep pretending their skillset isn't limited to 'talk about the good old days at the management consulting firm we at together sucking blood from the productive parts of society' with the CEO, that person will pay some kind of protection fee or do whatever dance the writer wants them to do to get them to stop.
As fun as it is to outline such a scheme, it seems incredibly implausible, since a person who's entire income is reliant on corporate media relations wouldn't bite the hand that feeds them to make a few dollars from a corporate enshittifier. Also, the path from 'hit piece' to 'rolling in the dough' seems kind of long and windy, and there are a few steps in there that I don't really get how they would work.
This is why the OP just insinuated the whole thing instead of saying it -- because when you write it down fully it sounds ridiculous.
classic protection racket: a guy with a blog rolling up to a millionaire and breaking his kneecaps. You'll never work in this town again, buddy! I've got a blog! The millionaire calls the cops but they won't help because they're too busy chasing dogs with their cars, so he calls his other millionaire friends but they're too busy teaching LLMs how to sell banner ads or teaching self-driving cars how to hit dogs. The millionaire gnashes his teeth and rends his garments. But then he remembers! The law! He calls up a lawyer and says, "this guy with a blog is slandering me, and he broke my kneecaps! I've tried everything and nothing works!" The lawyer thinks for a moment and responds, "that sounds like libel to me, not slander." Crestfallen at the news that he mixed up two very similar concepts, the millionaire settles for having a highly-paid job ruining one of the world's foremost search engines, and accepts the reality that no one in San Francisco has more power than a guy with a blog.
In all seriousness, written defamation is a tort if you can prove that the allegations about you are both factually false (not just "opinions I don't like" or "not the full story" - even the statement "X is a Nazi" might not be defamatory) and materially damaging. It doesn't sound like either of those is the case.
If this guy loses a $10M/year job over these posts, his lawyer may well go through them to see if they are defamatory.
Interesting stuff. We use MemoryDB as the underlying service for BullMQ, a NodeJS queue that’s built on top of Redis. We trade off a bit of speed and cost (MemoryDB costs more than Elasticache) for persistence and BullMQ’s many features, which is a good tradeoff for most apps.
I was inspired by Hey.com’s screener feature but I didn’t want to move my existing Gmail accounts, so I created one for myself: https://app.inboxhero.org/
The idea is first-time senders will be moved out of your inbox and you will get a screener to manually whitelist/blacklist them.
Am now trying to productize it, my thesis is emails will becoming even spammier now that LLMs can pass the Turing test, so a feature like this will be key to restore sanity to your inbox.
I think Git itself is probably too entrenched to be displaced by now, but I recently came across Graphite (https://graphite.dev/) and, while it’s all still Git under the hood, it abstracts away many of the common pain points (stacking PRs, rebasing) and has nice integrations with GitHub and VS Code.
Instead of getting into a shouting match over whether piracy is or isn’t stealing, here’s an interesting story.
Bill Gates made an interesting comment regarding software piracy in the 1990s. At that time, software piracy was rampant in China, and Microsoft’s Windows operating system was one of the most pirated products. In response to this situation, Gates remarked that if people were going to pirate software, he would prefer they pirate Microsoft’s software.
His rationale was strategic: if people in China became accustomed to using Microsoft’s Windows and Office software, they would be more likely to continue using these products in the future, including in business environments where legitimate software licenses are more commonly purchased.
(Whether things worked out as he envisioned is a slightly different matter.)
> (Whether things worked out as he envisioned is a slightly different matter.)
Well, actually they did, at least in ex-USSR, and I think in Eastern Europe too.
After not ever having a single legitimate license in 1990s and early 2000s (and being laughed upon if you had one), by late 2000s Microsoft business took off handsomely.
the same goes for most professional software, like the adobe suite. if people pirated, it's because they're not professionals yet. once they are, they're more likely to buy the software they're used to and not the competition.
> While this obviously contributed to rising prices, the report finds that company profits increased at a much faster rate than costs did, in a process often dubbed “greedflation.”
I think there is this expectation that companies "should" only raise prices necessary to cover their cost increases. But companies charge what the market can bear and, depending on the specific circumstances, this could be equal to, less than, or more than the cost increases.
To use a HN-friendly example, let's say AWS cuts their EC2 costs. If you're providing an undifferentiated computation service using EC2, you'll likely have to cut your costs or you will lose all your business to your competitors. If you're providing a highly differentiated SaaS product, you can probably keep the cost savings to yourself.
You can reason in the opposite direction for price hikes. Depending on the exact company in question, they could be in a privileged position of the supply chain or have marketing power that allows them to increase prices even more.
One main difference here is price stickiness [1], i.e. prices tend to be fixed for a period of time, even if the underlying economics has changed. I think this is underlying reason for perceptions of "greedflation" because, during period of inflation, prices become less sticky and companies use this to adjust prices to better match the underlying economics.
In a free and competitive markets, this would not have happened, or at least would quickly be corrected for by new sellers.
This is solid evidence that we do not have a free and competitive marketplace for most goods and services. That is the problem and its gets worse every day.
It still fucking sucks that price increases put even more pressure on people under and around the poverty line.
The economy isn't just some abstract numbers game, there are real people living in it.
The expectation that companies shouldn't juice more money out of customers who will suffer (or at the very least have to lower their living standards, which isn't as bad but is still not awesome) because of it is a very justified one.
There are no free lunches. The idea that inflation can be curbed by companies being more empathetic is wrong. If they don't raise prices during a spate of inflation, then they'll have to fire workers or make other cuts.
I would frame it slightly differently: people (and by extension, these companies) have always been greedy, so what is the new variable that actually enabled them to convert this greed into higher prices?
